The advent and growth of the World Wide Web and networking software have enabled private individuals and business personnel to access information from an increasing number of sources, such as web servers, database servers, enterprise systems, and other forms of information storage systems. The type of information available is also diverse. A user may access structured information (e.g., data stored in tables of a database) and unstructured information (e.g., Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents obtained from a Web server on the Internet).
The large number and types of documents available makes the search for specific or relevant information a complex and difficult task. To find such information, users often take advantage of search engines to help generate lists of potentially relevant documents. Conventional search engines allow a user to input a search request in a computer system and receive a result list of objects based on the search terms included in the user's request. To aid the user in assessing the relevance of the individual search hits included in the search results, the search engine may present excerpts from the documents with the search term(s) highlighted. Such operations enable the user to view the context in which the search terms appear to aid in determining the relevance of the search results.
For example, conventional search engines that provide unstructured result objects (e.g., Web page) obtained from the Internet may present results including a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of a search result object along with a highlighted excerpt from the Internet document. This feature provides a user additional information regarding the relevance of the search result object.
Problems occur, however, when searching structured data objects, such as those provided by Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Typically, structured data object search engines return a result list in the form of a table. The columns of the table may be predefined, thus they do not depend on the data object attributes where the search term is located. Further, they do not highlight the search term in the table, even if the appropriate column is displayed. For example, a conventional search engine is not capable of displaying a portion of data in proximity of a search term found in such a data object because the object is not a stream of words, as with the unstructured Internet document. Accordingly, conventional systems are deficient in conveying the relevance of structured data objects included in a result list. For instance, an enterprise search request including the search term “Hamburg” may result in a number of search result objects that include the term in different attributes, such as a name attribute, a city name attribute, a street name attribute, and a comments field attribute (i.e., “met him in Hamburg”). Conventional systems lack the capability of conveying the relevance of the structured result objects to the search request.
Thus, there is a need for a search engine that can convey the relevance of result objects collected in response to an enterprise search request of structured data object.